It was chaotic on the shore. Torch beams wavered here and there as the rescue party searched for survivors. It was impossible to tell whether the oil-black, huddled shapes on the beach were rocks or bodies until you reached down to touch them, feeling for hard stone or yielding flesh. Every now and then there would be a cry of ‘Over here!’， the words snatched by the wind and almost lost beneath the crashing of the waves.
The crofters from the cottages at Cove had been first on the scene, summoned by the flares sent up when the ship had been beached on the rocks and by an officer who had managed to swim ashore and climb the cliff to summon help. The men had raced down to the bay, followed by the women bringing blankets and a can of hot tea. A fire had been lit and there were glimpses of huddled figures in the light of the leaping flames as they attempted to revive the survivors.
Flora and Mairi stumbled towards the faint light of one of the torches and helped get a casualty on to a stretcher. The sailor retched and choked, covered in thick black oil and coughing up seawater, exhausted from the swim to shore.
Somewhere out there, beyond the reach of the torchlight and the headlight beams of the waiting vehicles on the cliff top that illuminated the feverish dance of the snow, the vessel was being swallowed, inexorably, by the ocean. Had she sailed just a few hundred yards further on, the crew would have been able to make the turn into the safety of the loch, but in the snow-shrouded darkness they’d swung close to the shore too early and the storm had driven the ship into the rocky maw of the point. Summoned by the flares fired from the mortally wounded ship, a tug from the harbour had tried to reach the stricken vessel, firing a line across to it to pull it to safety, but the waves and the wind were too wild and had thwarted the rescue attempt.
‘Do we know the name of the vessel?’ Flora shouted to one of the stretcher-bearers as they were about to make the perilous journey back up the cliff path with their patient.
‘It’s a Yankee ship,’ he yelled back. ‘The William H. Welch.’
Anxiously, Flora turned to Mairi, about to ask her whether she knew the name of the Gustavsens’ ship. But she froze as a beam of torchlight illuminated the mask of anguish on her friend’s face. Following her gaze, Flora turned to see Alec and Ruaridh carrying a lifeless body between them. As the faint glimmer of light scanned over them, something pale gleamed for a fleeting moment, a glint of gold in the darkness. And then Flora realised, horrified, that what she had glimpsed was a strand of white-blond hair.
‘It’s Hal,’ shouted Ruaridh. As they drew alongside, Flora laid her fingertips in the soft crook of his neck, feeling for a pulse. But she could see already that it was too late.
Mairi had stumbled away, calling Roy’s name, her anguished screams like the cries of a seabird on the wind. They searched frantically, knowing he wouldn’t have been far from his brother’s side, that he must, now, be here somewhere. After an eternity they found him, washed ashore, the fronds of his hair drifting like golden weed at the water’s edge. As Flora shouted for a stretcher, Mairi fell to her knees beside him, oblivious to the icy water. She laid her ear against his chest and gave a single, wrenching sob of relief as she felt the rise of a faint breath. And then Flora had pulled her away as the medics went to work, willing him to live, to breathe again, to swim hard against the current that had already swept his brother away, fighting his way back to the shores of the living.
As the storm began to abate and a grey dawn broke – at last – over the hills, Flora and Mairi climbed wearily back up the cliff path, following the stretcher-bearers carrying the last of the survivors. There weren’t many – only a scant dozen of the crew of over seventy had managed to live through the brutal onslaught of the storm-whipped sea. The girls were soaked to the skin, shivering with shock and cold that they scarcely registered. Through the dark hours of that February morning, they had made the journey back and forth to the hospital at Gairloch three times, carrying survivors, each one a miracle pulled from the black water. The first of them had been Roy Gustavsen.
At the near end of the beach a long row of bodies had been laid on the damp sand, their limbs gently straightened as they were set down carefully one alongside the other. Some were heart-achingly young, boys who’d joined the Merchant Marine as they were not yet old enough for military service. In that row, Hal Gustavsen lay beside his fellow crew members, and Flora had wept hot salt tears over him, her heart leaden at the thought of having to break the news to Bridie, and of Mairi having to tell Roy. And as the feeble winter daylight won the struggle to push the night westwards, it revealed the broken carcass of the William H. Welch, impaled on the rocks where the hungry, scavenging waves continued to pick clean its bones.